WASHINGTON, (Reuters) – U.S. researchers said yesterday they had designed a new kind of malaria drug that  kills the parasite that causes the disease and keeps it from  becoming resistant to the drug.

Tests in mice show the compound also helps other malaria  drugs work better, the researchers reported in the journal  Nature.

Now they are looking for funding to step up development,  Jane Kelly and colleagues at the Veteran Affairs Medical Center  and Oregon Health and Science University in Portland said.

Malaria is a mosquito-borne disease that kills 880,000  people a year, most of them in Africa and most under the age of  5. There is no vaccine against the parasite that causes the  illness and it quickly evolves resistance against drugs.

Kelly and colleagues set out to design a drug that could  stop the parasite.

“When the parasite invades the human body, it takes up the  red blood cells,” Kelly said in a telephone interview. “They  take the hemoglobin from our red blood cells and they chew it  up.”

The iron-containing heme in these cells is toxic to the  parasites but they can convert it to a nontoxic form.